Ramblings from an earthling whose serious attempts at confronting reality may just piss some fellow earthlings off..;)

Saturday, February 09, 2008

The last time I posted in my blog was more than 2 years ago, when I was still an employee of a wanna be so called high tech company, which has more or less faded into oblivion these days. If anyone mentions the name of the company, it is often for the wrong reasons. Nevertheless, I must say I did learn some valuable lessons there, not least of which is the need to maintain my humility at all times. The only reason I said so is because some individuals from my previous company felt they had at their disposal a world class technology, one which would display earth shattering performance and that anyone who did not buy into the technology would walk away at their own peril......but how wrong they were. Not only did they have the most difficult of times trying to get people to believe in the technology, they didn't even have a product!! (yup, no product maaa!!)

Well to cut a long story short, the last thing I heard was that the company was still trying to get buy a meaningful buy in into the technology (I know, they never learn that you need to sell a PRODUCT!!!!!!!!), but hear this folks, they actually got another company to loan them money, to the point where the other company practically FOLDED!!! Now that is what I call a major coup! You may ask, how could the other company be so stupid? Didn't the other company conduct due diligence prior to loaning the money? I'm sure they would have, but as a reliable source put it, the other company was arm twisted into loaning the money! How could there be arm twisting? Well, to put it mildly, the whole deal has conflict of interest splashed all over it. And this all happened in the presence of many, many so called educated individuals, holding pedigree qualifications from prestigious universities. The problem is, they just knew how to spend; they didn't know how to sell. Selling is about winning over your customer with a good product or service, neither of which they had unfortunately.

That's what you get when you allow people with no business building experience to hold so much money. They just spend and spend and spend, hoping that their business would someday achieve astronomical valuations so that they can sell it to the next sucker. Welcome to the world of venture capital folks, where reality could more often than not be a house of cards waiting to fall all over the place. Ironically, the initials of the company literally meant the 'Learned Master' in Chinese. Truth is folks, they were far from it. If I were to rate them, they wouldn't even rank close to the proverbial droopy eyed, drooling and often times snoring student at the back of your class, whose head would often become the target of the blackboard duster which found its trajectory from the palm of the geography teacher's right hand. Yeah, it's that bad OK?? Except for the Malaysian team, and some brave souls from the Singaporean team, none of the rest deserved even an iota of respect. Till today, the company is for all intent and purpose languishing in dire straits, waiting for the next sucker to walk into their web of deceit.

What makes me so upset is that this particular company was practically funded to the brim by Malaysian taxpayers, USD2.0 million to begin with, which would have been more than sufficient for the company to come up with at least 1 product that works. Give me even a quarter of that amount and I would spin the money ten fold within the first year of operations, generating clean profits within my first 6 months. What was even worst was that they never executed the Malaysian project, acquired by yours truly within my first 6 months of joining the company. Instead they would rather spend on other projects which were not contracted for. Needless to say, the never got paid because the technology didn't work. What a sad turn of events - from being a potential superstar the company just dropped out of the radar screens, potential customers and investors included. I guess the only reason people give face to the company's directors is because one of them happens to be the brother of a certain Malaysian minister. One VERY POWERFUL minister he is, so nobody messes around with our friend the director, even though he is a step brother of the minister.

So much about that company, so now I've moved on. I'm on my own, doing several things one of which is manufacturing laundry detergent. You got that right - LAUNDRY DETERGENT!! It began as an experiment, which somehow attracted customers, so much so that people wanted me to keep producing because they swear by it and that they wouldn't use other detergents!! So from being an experiment, it became a hobby and now it has become my livelihood. I'll tell you more about what I do in my next posting folks.. have a good rest of the weekend :D